Welcome To 2012, Cap
by Bombshell1701
Summary: Five things about 2012 that make Steve Rogers unhappy, and one thing that doesn't. Post-Captain America/pre-and-post-Avengers, with a cameo from Tony. Rated M for bad language and adult themes. Author's note at the end. R&R please


**Five things about 2012 that make Steve Rogers unhappy, and one thing that doesn't.**

**1.**

"You have a follow-up psych evaluation at eight a.m. on Tuesday. You gonna show up to this one?" Fury asked.

"Yes. Last time I just forgot" Steve answered.

"Well maybe you need to set yourself a reminder in your phone, so you don't forget."

Steve was quiet for a moment. "Uh… I can't. My phone…broke."

Fury frowned. "What, did you drop it?"

"That was the last one."

"You forget to take it out of your pocket and put it through the wash?"

Steve sighed. "That was the one before."

"How many phones are you going to go through? They don't grow on trees." Fury said, irritation creeping into his voice.

"It's not my fault they're so flimsy. You make everything out of plastic these days, what do you expect?" Steve shot back. "And if you really want to know, I pressed it too hard, and the screen cracked so it stopped working. Must've been my stupid, old-fashioned fingers."

Fury looked at him steadily, his face neutral. "I'll get another one sent up for you."

"Don't worry about it." Steve said, reaching into his pocket and taking out a small notepad and pencil. He flipped it open and wrote himself a note. "I don't have anyone to call, anyway."

**2.**

"What the hell is taking you so long?" The man complained.

"I'm just… I don't know what… look, you go ahead" Steve muttered, his face flushing.

"Thanks so much" the man shot back.

Steve opened his mouth to say "No problem" but quickly realised the man was being sarcastic. Instead he shuffled over to let the impatient man up to the counter, where he barked his order at the clerk. Steve turned back to the board, trying to figure out what on earth a Frappuccino was. He just wanted a coffee, plain, hot and strong. This place was supposed to be a coffee bar, but he couldn't find any actual evidence of that.

He looked at the clerk, about to ask for her guidance, but she studiously ignored him, and continued serving the people in line. Steve sighed quietly, and listened to what the other customers ordered, hoping to get an idea, but it was like they were speaking another language. A soy chai blender? A white choc mocha latte? A double-shot caramel frappe? Why did they make everything so complicated nowadays?

"You figure it out yet?" the clerk asked him. "Ready to order, sweetcheeks?" she asked impatiently.

His brow furrowed as he looked at her- she looked like she was about sixteen. Did children really talk to their elders like that? She looked expectantly at him.

"Coffee. Please just give me a coffee. No caramel. No double-anything. Just a coffee. Can you do that?" he said as gently as he could.

"Whatever you want, buddy" she said dismissively. "What size?" She pointed to a range of different sized takeout coffee cup. Steve considered them.

"C'mon man, it's not a life-or-death decision" the woman behind him muttered, as she tapped her foot impatiently.

"Give me the biggest damn coffee you've got." Steve said, frowning.

**3.**

Steve's head was spinning. He'd served in the army, spent weeks in trenches with unruly, frustrated men, and he'd heard some truly nasty stuff; but he'd never heard anyone speak so disrespectfully about women. The conversation at the next table was turning his stomach. Two men sat clutching beers, talking loudly, one regaling the other in brash detail with a story of his latest sexual conquest.

"C'mon guys, give it a rest" he finally cut in.

The two men stopped their lecherous conversation and turned to look at him.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Are we offending you?" one asked with mock apology.

"The woman you're talking about, the one you 'hooked up' with? Do you really need to talk about her like that? She's a person. Somebody's daughter. Maybe somebody's sister. Would you like it if you had a sister and some guy talked about her like that?"

The guy sneered. "If I had a sister who was as big a slut as the bitch I fucked last night, I'd say she was asking for it."

Steve shook his head. "Have you never heard the expression 'discretion is the better part of valour'?"

The men stared at him. "Fucking faggot" the other one spat.

Great. Now he was being labelled homosexual for speaking his mind. He sighed. "You need to learn some respect" he muttered.

"Not from a faggot like you" he first man said, his bravado awash with beer. "You need to have your ass kicked, you pussy-whipped bitch."

"I'm sorry, what?" Steve asked, genuinely confused about what the man had said. But the other men took it as a challenge.

"I'm going to kick your fucking face in." the first man said.

Steve stared at him. "Are we taking this outside?" Fury was going to kill him for brawling with the public.

"You better fucking believe it." The second man said.

"You guys going to pull knives or anything stupid, or is this going to be a fair fight?" Steve had been warned about that sort of thing. Apparently no-one fought fair nowadays if they could help it.

"Fuck no, we're gonna kick your ass, fair and square."

"Fine" Steve said. He threw some money on the table to pay for his drink, and followed the men outside to the car park. As soon as they reached the asphalt the first man turned and swung. Steve caught his fist, and pivoted to kick the other man, who had moved to grab him from behind. The man he kicked went flying, and landed ten feet away in a painful heap. He twisted the arm of the first man, pinning it behind the man's back. He rushed him forward and shoved him face-first onto the bonnet of a nearby car. The man swore and struggled, but Steve held fast.

"You need to learn to treat people with respect, especially women. When you use epithets against other people you're really only labelling yourself as ignorant. So no more 'bitches' and 'sluts' and 'faggots' got it?

He kept the man pinned; twisting is arm in increments until the man finally yelped an agreement. With one final shove, he let the man up.

He shook his head. If he had to fight every man that spoke like that nowadays, he'd be fighting non-stop.

**4.**

"Steven, didn't anyone ever teach you that it's rude to stare?" Tony said quietly.

Steve caught himself and tore his eyes away. He angled his body towards Tony as casually as he could. "What is on that guy's face?" he hissed.

"Jewellery. They're facial piercings."

"Facial piercings?" Steve muttered to himself. He mulled it over, and then, not being able to help himself, looked over at the pierced man again.

"You're staring again" Tony chided, trying not to smirk at the look of abject horror on his friend's

face.

"So they're like earrings that a woman would put in her pierced ears? But he has them _in his face_?"

Tony nodded. "Bits of metal, punched in to any loose bit of flesh. Probably has them all over his body"

Steve stared at him. "Why?" he asked, disturbed.

Tony shrugged. "Likes to set of metal detectors at the airport? To freak out his conservative parents? You're still staring at the guy, by the way."

Steve shuddered, and then reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulling out his sunglasses and slipping them on. He resumed his contemplation of the pierced man.

"Subtle." Tony snickered.

A moment later something else caught Steve's eye, and he whipped around so fast he nearly fell over. Tony followed the other man's intense gaze to a young woman in a summer dress. Every inch of visible skin on her body was covered in tattoos; tigers, carp, anchors, pin-up girls, cherry blossoms. The effect was dizzying as she walked.

"Hey, Tony, is there a circus in town?"

Tony sighed.

**5.**

"How many channels?" Steve asked, incredulous.

"Hundreds. And still nothing worth watching." Sitwell said with a small smile.

Steve stared at the big screen. "I heard stories about some rich people having pay television back in 1941, but I never saw it. I just went to the movies."

"Well, there's a bunch of movie channels. And a lot of sport." He smiled reassuringly, and handed Steve a slender device. "This is the remote. These buttons change the channel. These control the volume. This adjusts the picture quality. You can record a show to watch later by pressing this button." He pointed to various features on the remote in rapid succession, and Steve just nodded in agreement: he was a fast learner, but he already knew this was going to take some time to figure out.

"All right, have fun. Just don't bother trying to tune in to the Playboy channel. Fury had it blocked." Sitwell said, frowning slightly.

"Playboy?" Steve asked.

"Ah, okay" Sitwell sighed. "We'll talk about that another time."

He left Steve to explore the device. The buttons on the remote were tiny, and Steve kept mashing them when he'd try to change the channel. He fumbled for several minutes, causing the TV to lose picture or go berserk, but eventually he got the picture back and worked out how to scroll through the different channels.

There seemed to be lots of ads selling everything from overly-complicated fitness equipment to products guaranteed to make your skin younger, fresher or acne-free in as little as seven days. There were plenty of shows where sympathetic hosts interviewed sobbing women about their weight struggles or cheating spouses. He found television dramas he didn't really understand (someone named _Buffy_ who slayed vampires? Really?) And then there were movies he didn't recognise that all seemed to be about romances and relationships, and they all seemed to star the same people. And then there were shows that made even less sense. They seemed to be about nothing at all. Young women and men were followed around by television cameras, shopping, going out, having arguments with their friends and family. Half the things they were saying were beeped out, and it took Steve a while to realise these people were swearing and it was being censored. It was like they had volunteered to have their lives broadcast nationally; and what uninteresting lives they were. The women were self-obsessed and empty-headed; the males argumentative and vain.

He got angry and restless, and flipped the channels around again, still searching for engagement. He watched a nature documentary about African wild cats, narrated by a calm, enthusiastic British man. That was pretty nice. Then he watched two goofy men on some kind of science show as they blew up a cement truck. That was funny.

And still, he drifted back to the swearing idiots. Watching them was almost hypnotic, and he felt like he might get stupider if he tuned in for too long. So he just sat there, staring at them in contempt.

"Still watching TV?" Sitwell asked with a smirk.

Steve stirred. He'd been in a stupor, watching yet another TV show of people's supposed real lives. "Who are these people?" Steve asked. "And why do they have a TV show? They do nothing. They don't sing or dance, they're not funny or entertaining or talented in any way I've seen. They just spend money and dress up and abuse each other. I don't understand it. Are they really like that? There's so many of them, on this channel, or another channel, or another."

Sitwell nodded. "Welcome to reality."

**And one thing that doesn't...**

The Astor was what Fury called an _art-house _cinema. They showed pretty much every kind of movie from the past seven decades, but rarely featured a current-release film. They showed foreign films with English subtitles. They showed three movies a day, seven days a week, and you could go in and watch all three each day for twelve dollars. Steve had a lot of catching up to do, and a lot of spare time, so he was in heaven.

The cinema was packed for the Saturday evening feature, a little film called _The Wizard of Oz_. Steve had seen it three times the month it was released back in '39, and had actually managed to get all the way through it twice (one of the times he'd missed most of it, having been hauled out to fight by a guy making deeply inappropriate comments about Billie Burke.) He hadn't seen the movie in a long time… a really long time, and so he was surprised and delighted that its popularity hadn't diminished. The house lights went down, and the movie started. Steve leaned back in the velvet cinema seat, smiling through the sepia-tined first part of the film. And when Dorothy's house landed, and she stepped out into Oz… it was like seeing an old friend again. He felt a surge of emotion in his chest, and remembered exactly how the technicoloured land of Oz had made him feel the first time he watched the movie; because it was exactly how he felt now- amazed, fascinated and incredibly impressed. Tears of joy welled in his eyes, and he self-consciously dashed them away.

Two hours later, Steve walked out of the cinema feeling lighter than he had in weeks. He stood on the sidewalk and looked at the city around him: busy people, tourists with their camera flashes, neon signs, cars and buses, noise and energy; it was inescapable. He knew now _exactly_ how Dorothy felt when she landed in Oz; small and frightened and alien in such an improbable place. But she got through it, by being brave and earnest and making friends.

So maybe he would be okay after all….


End file.
